


Dig Me Out

by acertainlady



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Emotional Alex Danvers, F/F, Heavy Angst, Past Sexual Assault, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Kara Danvers, Self-Hatred, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:27:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25867411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acertainlady/pseuds/acertainlady
Summary: (CW: Past Sexual Violence and PTSD)At first, you’re not sure it’s him. Or maybe you are sure, are merely trying to convince yourself it isn’t him, for your own peace of mind.But no, it is definitely him.And just like that, you’re overwhelmed. You feel the ghosts of his hands on you, you start twitching in physical reaction to what feels so real for being just a memory. Just a memory, you tell yourself. It isn’t really happening. It was years ago. Years. But you feel it; you feel him. Feel his hands on you, feel his weight, pinning you. You feel dizzy, sick, just like you did that night...Maggie asks you what’s wrong. And normally you’re composed, normally you thrive in crisis, normally you are fight fight fight, never flight, and certainly never freeze. You don’t freeze, but now you’re frozen, at a total loss for words, your eyes fixed on the man who had entered the bar and started this whole breakdown, and all you can do is nod futilely in his direction, as if by doing so, they’ll understand.
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer
Comments: 16
Kudos: 89





	Dig Me Out

**Author's Note:**

> So, I started writing this about a week ago and, well...I certainly didn't expect it to turn into a 16k+ word piece, but that's what happened.
> 
> Please, please heed the content warnings. This is a rather intense journey of unaddressed PTSD resulting from a past sexual assault, and the self-hatred, grief, and depersonalization when that trauma is forced to resurface. The story gets, as my girlfriend describes, "graphically emotional."
> 
> I hope I did this justice.

The night starts off well enough.

Normally, you all would go straight to the alien bar, but at some point earlier that day, somebody (nobody even remembers who) suggested you mix it up, have a drink at Noonan’s first. An innocent, acceptable enough idea. No harm in mixing things up, right?

So you sit at a table with Kara, Maggie, and J’onn, sipping overpriced, pretend-fancy drinks, waiting (somewhat) patiently for Winn and James to join so you can all leave and head to your more familiar, preferred haunt.

“Is it just me, or does alcohol not taste as good when you know you’re being overcharged for it?” Maggie smirks, staring into the depths of her cocktail.

“Maybe it’s that it tastes better when you know you’re being undercharged,” you counter, taking a moment to admire your girlfriend.

The conversation is light, bantering, steering clear from discussions of work, of danger, of stress, and focusing on easier topics. Soon it devolves into Kara and Maggie having a friendly yet lively debate over the legitimacy of vegan ice cream. You stay out of it, because you agree with Kara, and Maggie sometimes gets jealous and defensive and short with you when she feels like you side with your sister over her (even when it’s nothing but a casual and innocent difference of opinion and you don’t see how it matters who you agree with), and tonight, you’d rather be safe than sorry, so you stay out of it. You catch J’onn’s eye and exchange a knowing smile, then you scan the bar to see if James and Winn are there yet.

That’s when you see him.

At first, you’re not sure it’s him. Or maybe you are sure, are merely trying to convince yourself it isn’t him, for your own peace of mind.

But no…no, it is definitely him.

And just like that, you’re overwhelmed. You feel the ghosts of his hands on you, start twitching in physical reaction to what feels so real for being just a memory. _Just a memory_ , you tell yourself. It isn’t really happening. It was years ago. Years. But you feel it; you feel him. Feel his hands on you, feel his weight, pinning you. You feel dizzy, sick, just like you did that night. You try to ground yourself, flex your fingers around your beer glass, reminding yourself that you aren’t that drunk, now. You’ve barely had one beer—nothing like that night. That night when you let yourself— _no, it’s not your fault, Alex._ Kara’s voice rings in your head, the lingering shadows of her condolences. _It’s not your fault_.

But it was.

You’re not in Noonan’s anymore. You’re in that room, the room you don’t even know where it was or how you got there, but he’s there, too, and you’re drunk, out-of-control, out-of-body. You’re struggling, but you’re not strong enough. You’re arguing, crying, but he isn’t listening. You feel his hands— _his hands_. They’re all over you. And you hear him, his voice, raspy and slurring, telling you it’s okay, you’re okay, you’re liking it, but he’s wrong, you aren’t liking it, you don’t like it, you want him to stop, and you’re arguing, crying, but he isn’t listening. You try to sit up, to fight back, to get away, but it makes you dizzy, and he’s stronger than you when you’re like this, even though he was drinking, too. You know because you smell it, on his breath. He smelled like Hennessy, and the smell followed you. It follows you, ever since.

_You’re not there. You’re safe. It’s not your fault you couldn’t stop it._

But the guilt, the shame floods you. You can’t breathe, you can’t blink. Every time you breathe, it smells like Hennessy, and every time you blink, you see him, on top of you, pinning you down. You should have been able to stop it. You should have known better.

“Alex?”

You aren’t sure who says your name, because it only does so much to snap you out of your spiral. If you were able to register the world around you, you might notice that your sister, girlfriend, and boss are all staring at you like you are the only thing that matters. You might notice the concern, the love, that they direct toward you.

But all you notice is that _he_ is here. In this bar. In this city. What is he doing here? What is—?

Then it hits you…would he even recognize you? After that night, so many years ago…did he even _realize_ what he did to you that night? Did he know the damage he’d done? Did he know that after he walked you home, pretending to be a gentleman, pretending you’d wanted it, that you sat on the floor and called your sister, so broken and unable to form words that after less than a minute on the phone with you, Kara had used her powers, had risked exposure, for the first time in years just to fly to your dorm and hold you? Did he know how long it took you before you could trust anybody to touch you again? Before you could be in the same room as anybody drinking that horrible liquor, just in case the smell, that smell, _his smell_ , accidentally wafted toward you?

“Alex.”

It’s more urgent, this time, and accompanied by touch. Kara and Maggie. Maggie was sitting across from you, next to J’onn, but she’s moved to the other side of the table, so now you’re sandwiched between your sister and your girlfriend on the bench, each of them with a hand on your shoulder. Kara’s other hand reaches out for your hand while Maggie opts to rest hers on your thigh.

Maggie asks you what’s wrong.

And normally you’re composed, normally you thrive in crisis, normally you are _fight fight fight_ , never flight, and certainly never freeze. You don’t freeze, but now you’re frozen, at a total loss for words, your eyes fixed on the man who had entered the bar and started this whole breakdown, and all you can do is nod futilely in his direction, as if by doing so, they’ll understand.

“Alex,” Kara repeats, calmly but sternly, moving her hand from your shoulder to your jaw so she can move your gaze away from him until it meets her frightened blue eyes. “Talk to me.”

The look in her eyes, so determined and affectionate, transfixes you, and for a second, you remember where you are, and you don’t feel as drunk or dizzy or petrified. It’s only for a second, but it’s long enough for you to manage to speak, long enough for you to blurt out, “It’s him.”

“Him who?”

“Hennessy.”

And then Kara jerks her hands away from you, and you lose the gravity of her touch, and you start to float away again. You know she wants to comfort you, but she probably doesn’t trust herself not to injure whoever she happens to be in physical contact with at the moment, because even in your haze, you see her rage. Rage beyond imagination, rage she can’t dream of controlling, rage she’s only felt a handful of times before, almost all of which involved somebody trying to (or having managed to) hurt you.

“Which one?” she asks you, and her voice is cold, detached, in a way that makes Maggie flinch next to you, because unlike you, she’s never seen Kara this angry. She’s only seen Kara as a happy-go-lucky, optimistic superhero who thinks everyone is good and can be saved and deserves kindness, and that’s not what she sounds like now. Now, your sister sounds like a robot, built to kill, and you know if you point out which one, she will hurt him, and so you shake your head, try not to even look in his direction in case she follows your glance. You close your eyes just in case.

You close your eyes, but it’s a bad idea, because he’s on the back of your eyelids, so you tear your eyes back open and pull the hood of your sweatshirt tighttighttight as tight as it can go over your head, over your face, trying to cut yourself off from the world, trying to keep yourself from catching even the smallest glimpse of him, the man who is trapped in your memories, and who you are now trapped in the same bar with.

And so you don’t notice J’onn. J’onn, who hates not knowing what’s going on, who hates lacking situational awareness, especially when it comes to the Danvers sisters (whom he promised to protect and whom, over the years, he began to see as his surrogate daughters). Especially because he’s never seen you two act this way. He’s seen you face certain death, seen you face Kara’s certain death (which, he knows, scares you a hell of a lot more than your own certain death, you’d die a thousand times if it meant saving Kara’s life), but he’s never seen you like this. He’s never seen you shut down, seen your eyes glaze over, like you’re reliving the worst moment of your life on a constant loop. And, he’s seen Kara get angry—he’s seen her get so angry that she solar flared, seen her get so angry that she loses control of herself—but he’s never seen her get so angry that she loses her compassion, her empathy. He’s never seen her get so angry as she is now, knowing the man who did this to you is somewhere in this bar, looking like the only thing stopping her from unleashing her heat vision into the room is that she doesn’t know who she’s supposed to aim it at.

So, despite promising himself (and you) that he’d stop invading your privacy like this, he eases his way into your mind. Not that you’d be able to tell, anyway, other than the briefest transformation of his eyes from coal black to glowing red, which he knows to hide from you by now.

You would be able to tell, though, once he was in, because once he sees the flashes cycling through your brain, he can’t contain his reflexive reaction: his blood visibly boils, his fists clench, and he stands abruptly from his chair, scanning the room for the face he’d psychically seen, the face that did this to you. You’d be able to tell because you’d recognize the look in his eyes—it’s the one Kara had when she found out, the one where you know behind their eyes, they’re picturing picking the guy up, flying him high above the clouds, and dropping his screaming body down, down until it splattered on the pavement, not a trace of it left to be found.

“J’onn!”

The sound of Kara’s voice, reprimanding him, startles you, and you look up and you see her standing, next to J’onn. He’s barely taken a step away from the table, but she seems to know exactly what he’s thinking, almost like she can read minds, too.

Or, probably, because she’s spent the last eight years since this happened picturing all the ways she could kill the motherfucker who did this to you, too.

And so she’s standing next to J’onn, gripping his shoulder, and it looks a little too hard, even for a Green Martian, and her eyes are swimming with repressed rage, yet they’re still pleading, pleading with J’onn.

“Look at her,” Kara breathes, and she thinks she’s being quiet enough but you can hear her, because you’re zeroed in on her, because the world is too big and too small at the same time, because you’re scared, scared that your sister and your boss want to hurt someone and it’s your fault, your fault for letting this happen to you.

“He already took her control away from her that night. The last thing she needs right now is to see him make you lose yours.”

Kara says those words because those are the words your mother said to her eight years ago, after it happened. You called your sister, that night, after it happened, and she was there in an instant. She’d taken care of you, done everything you needed, put up with everything you threw at her (and you vaguely remember a few times when you literally _threw_ things at her, but it’s hard to tell, it was all a blur, those first couple weeks of aftermath), she got you through the worst of it. For two weeks, she stayed staunchly by your side, she didn’t even go to her own classes, no matter how often you told her to, because you didn’t go to yours. She just stayed, took care of you, and you felt bad, but you also knew you needed her. You were afraid of what would happen to you if she weren’t there.

After two weeks, though, you insisted Kara returned to her normal life, so you could try to do the same. It would be hard, for both of you, but you knew it had to happen. It took a lot of convincing, because your little sister hated the idea of abandoning you when she knew you were in need, and because frankly, you missed each other, and it had been nice to fall back into the familiar rhythm of being sisters, of worrying about each other in the same room, as opposed to from afar. But, reluctantly, you both agreed to try a return to normalcy, on the condition that you promised her you’d let her know if she needed to come back.

You didn’t, though. You didn’t ask her to come back, because you wanted to pretend none of it had ever happened. You wanted to push it away, move on.

But you still talked to her every day, sometimes multiple times a day, because that’s what you always did, even before. So you know that Kara, once she no longer had to actively focus on being your caretaker, had struggled with what happened. She’d told you, been honest with you, because she tells you everything, is always honest with you. Once she stopped taking care of you, her own reaction crashed into her full force, shattering her, destroying her. She felt nothing but pain, guilt, and anger. Anger like she never felt, like she never knew. Somebody had hurt you, and all she could think, all she could imagine, was hurting that person. Vivid, violent visions of how she wanted to hurt, maim, torture, _kill_ the man who did this to her favorite person on Earth—she spared you the details, but she told you about it, because she was scared, and because she wanted your permission to talk to Eliza about it. You let her, even though you were ambivalent about your mother knowing about what happened to you, because your sister was scared, and you’d do anything to make her better.

And then the next day, when you talked to Kara, she was better, and she told you that if you ever did want her to hurt someone for you, you could ask, and she would. You thanked her, even though the sentiment confused you, because you hadn’t heard what your mother said to Kara.

_“What you’re feeling, Kara, is hate. You hate the man who did this to your sister, and that’s okay. I hate him too. I hate him because of what he did to her, and I…I want him to suffer. But that won’t help anything. No amount of suffering he endures could take away, could erase the pain he caused Alex. Hurting him won’t make her better, and, more importantly, that’s not what she needs from you. Kara, your sister loves you. She admires you; she admires your heart and your soul and your capacity for love. If she wanted you to hurt him, she knows you could. She could ask. But that’s the last thing she needs. When he did that to her, when he…that man took her control away. She didn’t get a say in what happened to her. Let her have a say in what you do, okay? He already took her control away…don’t you go lose control, too. That’s the last thing she needs, is to see you lose control on the man who took her control away.”_

You didn’t hear that speech. You hear some of it now, though, because Kara is telling J’onn snippets of those same words. Gripping his shoulder a little harder than necessary, either to ground him or restrain him or both, she is quoting Eliza, saying, “The last thing she needs is to see you lose control on the man who took her control away.”

And then, next thing you know, you’re in your apartment, with Kara and Maggie and J’onn. They flew you there, you register that much, but you don’t remember if you flew with Kara or J’onn. Kara, probably, and J’onn took Maggie. That makes most sense. No way Kara would let you out of her protection, not right now. Not after—

“Why is he here?”

You’re shocked, frankly, when you hear your own voice. Your mind feels so disconnected from your body, you don’t even remember how to make thoughts turn into sound. You feel… _wrong_. Your body feels wrong, like it doesn’t belong to you, like you shouldn’t have a body, because you’re a machine. Breathing and circulation and your autonomic nervous system, they all feel like a science experiment. Your whole existence feels like a science experiment, detached and objective and simply _happening_. Nature is just taking its course and you are nothing but an observer, taking notes, keeping score, collecting data.

“Babe, do you know where you are?” Maggie asks you, her voice gentle, cautious. Shaky. You know she’s probably freaking out, although she knows what’s going on, at least generally—you explained the gist of Hennessy to her. You had to. You had to because of the time you were having sex and Maggie moaned _“You like it rough, huh?”_ into your ear and you shut down, went somewhere else, curled into the fetal position and shoved her away. Even though she was right, you _do_ like it rough with Maggie, you like when Maggie gets rough because you trust Maggie, you love Maggie, she’s the good kind of rough, but in that moment when she said those words, it wasn’t Maggie saying them, it was Hennessy, pinning you down to stop you from fighting, the bad kind of rough, and you didn’t like it, you hated it and you wanted it to stop, but the difference was that he didn’t stop and Maggie did, she always stops when you ask her. So when you told her to stop, she did, and she took care of you, and she asked what was happening, where you were, where you had gone, and so you told her about Hennessy, but not the details, because you don’t want Maggie to know those, but you told her your triggers, because she was nervous that, without knowing, she’d hurt you, send you back to that room with him. She wanted to know and you told her, because you felt safe that if she knew what triggered you, she’d take care of you, protect you from going back there.

But she can’t protect you now. Not from this. She’s never seen you like this. She knows something happened, knows your triggers (but not the details, never the details), seen you have brief flashbacks, but she’s never seen the trauma barrel down like this. Only your sister has ever seen you like this, and if you weren’t so deep in the throes of a depersonalized episode, deeper than you’ve been in years, you would be embarrassed that your girlfriend and your boss are witnessing this.

“Danvers? Do you know where you are?” Maggie’s voice prods you again.

“Home,” comes a reply, in a voice that sounds like yours, maybe, in some other dimension.

“Yeah, that’s right. You’re home, and you’re safe, and you’re surrounded by people who love you.”

But you’re not ready to hear that, so instead, you repeat, gravely: “Why is he _here?_ ”

“He’s just visiting,” J’onn answers. “I read his mind, to make sure. He’ll be gone in two days. Just an…unfortunate coincidence.”

You don’t know what to do with that information. You don’t even remember why you wanted to know. You’re barely holding onto reality, onto anything corporeal, onto _anything at all_. You feel like you’re drifting, floating away, and there’s nothing to tether you. You can’t do this. This is too much, you don’t exist. You don’t exist.

“I-I need—” you try to talk, but it’s hard because you don’t exist.

“What do you need?” Maggie asks, jumping at the chance to help, and she reaches her hands toward you, but you flinch backwards, away from her. You don’t mean to—it’s only just then that you realize you’re on a couch.

“Kara.”

“I’m here,” your sister says, and then strong Kryptonian arms wrap around you, hugging you just the way you need so you remember to breathe, remember to perceive, remember to _exist_ , hugging you with practiced pressure honed over years of sisterhood, of exchanged comfort. Kara knows to hug you just a little tighter now than you would normally tolerate, without having to ask or check, because she knows you better than anyone, and she knows this is what you need right now, even though until she does it, you didn’t even know you needed it.

With the sensation of your sister’s embrace, though, tiny hints of emotion start to trickle into your consciousness: first up, guilt.

It isn’t much, yet, but because you’re not aware of anything else, it feels like everything. It feels like the only thing you’ve ever been, ever can be, is guilty, ashamed, a burden, and so you burst at the seams with it, wailing _“I’m so sorry”_ into a strong shoulder over and over and over again.

“Not your fault,” Kara tries to assure you. “Never your fault. We just wanna help, thank you for letting us help you. Please let us help.”

And other people are saying other things, but you don’t listen, you keep apologizing, _“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,”_ over and over, and it shuts them up, but you keep repeating it, you keep repeating those three words, more times than anyone in the room can count. You say it so many different times, in so many different tones and cadences, for so many different reasons, that they can’t become numb to it. Every time you apologize, it breaks their hearts just as much as the first time you said it, yet they’re powerless, you can feel it. You can feel how much it’s hurting them, you feel it in the tenseness of Kara’s body around you; you feel it in the tenseness of Maggie’s body when she too circles her arms around you, again sandwiching you between your sister and your girlfriend; you feel it in the shaky, patriarchal hand J’onn puts on your shoulder, trying to offer whatever comfort he can while knowing his place is at a further distance than that of Kara and Maggie.

You know you’re breaking their hearts, but your guilt, your shame, is your entire world, and you can’t stop apologizing, and soon you’re no longer apologizing for being a burden, for ruining the night, for worrying them, for scaring them, for whatever other reasons you come up with, soon you’re apologizing for apologizing, you’re apologizing for breaking their hearts, you’re apologizing for your guilt, for your shame, for the fact that your guilt and your shame are your entire world, you’re apologizing for the fact that you can’t stop apologizing.

Then, suddenly, you’re not apologizing anymore. You don’t remember when you stopped, but you stopped, and you’re out of breath, and you’re squashed between a superhero and a cop and you start to feel suffocated, but also you can _feel_ something, something other than guilt, you’re aware of a sensation, and so you let yourself stay suffocated, because it must be working.

“It’s not your fault, Alex.”

You shake your head, able though unwilling to hear Kara’s words, the words she’s repeated countless times in the years since you let this happen to you.

“Did you hurt him?” you whimper, hating yourself for wanting to protect this man, for feeling sympathy for him, but you know, deep down, it’s not really for his sake, it’s just that you couldn’t live with yourself if you let your sister get revenge, hurt him, defy her character, all on your behalf, because of something you let happen, something you should have been able to stop. You couldn’t live with yourself. “Please tell me you didn’t hurt him.”

“I wanted to,” J’onn growls from somewhere. “But your sister stopped me.”

“Only because Eliza stopped me eight years ago,” Kara grumbles, and you wonder if she knows she confessed it until she continues, so you know she means it. “If I’d have known what he looked like then, something very mysterious yet bloody and violent might have happened on your campus.”

Maggie, feeling left out of the protective posturing, tries to lighten the mood, scoffing, “If I ever find out who he is, I’m gonna put an APB on him and make sure he gets so many moving violations he couldn’t dream of ever paying the fines.”

And that silly, empty threat actually elicits a chuckle from you. A vacant, mirthless chuckle, but something nonetheless resembling a chuckle.

Something about it, though. Something you can’t place. The fact that someone you love loves you back, the fact that _three_ people you love all love you back…you don’t deserve it. You know you don’t deserve it. You’re not good enough, not strong enough, not important enough. You don’t deserve it. They are only there for you because you’re so vulnerable, so pitiful. They don’t need you, not like you need them. You could never be there for them like they are for you, no matter how hard you try. You’re useless, pathetic. Nothing.

And so you peel away. It doesn’t take much effort, since they are already treating you like glass, and since you already aren’t aware enough of your body to know how much force your muscles are exerting. As far as you’re aware, there’s no real difference between when your loved ones are trying to comfort you and when you sink downdownaway from them, curling up on the floor, knees to chest, rocking back and forth—except that when you’re downdownaway from them, you’re not suffocating anymore.

You’re cold. And you’re heavy. You feel weak, and stupid. You hate feeling like this. Why do you feel like this?

You are unmoored. Broken.

Weak.

So weak, so stupid. You’re so weak, so stupid.

“Alex, please.”

Kara’s voice pulls you back a little, but not enough, and when she tries to put her hand on your shoulder, it doesn’t feel like Kara’s hand, it feels like _his_ hand, and so you jerk away with a barely-audible whimper, shaking your head.

“No. No.”

“Al—”

“ _No_.”

You chant the word again and again, waiting for it to help. Waiting for it to make this stop. But his hands are on you. His hands are all over you and they aren’t stopping, they won’t stop, no matter how many times you tell them to. He won’t stop.

“Hey,” Kara is saying. “Breathe for me. Can you do that? Can you breathe for me?”

Yes. The answer to that is yes, you know that. You can breathe. For Kara? You can breathe, if it’s for Kara. Inhale, exhale. You can do that. For Kara. Not for yourself. Kara does things for you all the time, helps you all the time, so you need to help her, too. Help her, return the favor. So if Kara needs you to breathe, you need to breathe. For Kara. That’s your job. Protect Kara. Take care of Kara. If she needs you to breathe, it is your job to breathe.

“You’re okay. You’re safe.”

That must be true, you think, because Kara is saying it, and Kara doesn’t lie to you. She would never lie to you, so if she’s saying you’re okay, you’re safe, then you must be okay. You must be safe. Kara wouldn’t lie to you. Kara wouldn’t tell you you’re safe if you’re not safe.

“Can you say that with me, Alex? ‘We’re okay, and we’re safe.’”

“We’re okay,” echoes a voice that still doesn’t sound like yours. It sounds hollow, empty, faraway. It sounds like you feel. “We’re safe.”

“Yeah, we are. How do you feel?”

“Weird,” you answer, and it’s the closest you can get to the truth, because truthfully, you don’t know how you feel.

“Okay. Wanna count your freckles?”

Somewhere, in the back of your mind, you remember how when Kara is scared, she likes to count the stars, but freckles are easier, because they’re there in the daytime, but Kara doesn’t have many freckles, so she counts your freckles, instead. So, mutely, automatically, without realizing, you nod. You like it when Kara counts your freckles. It helps her, and you like helping.

“Count them for me, okay? Tell me how many freckles are on your right arm.”

In any other circumstance, part of you understands, you might feel belittled, condescended…but also, when you look down at your arm, ready to count for Kara, you notice that it actually _is your_ _arm_. It isn’t just _an_ arm, it’s _your_ arm, and so you start counting all the freckles you can find, even the ones that have grown faint over the years, and you try to focus on that, you try to count and ignore the sotto voice conversation the others are having, obviously believing you’re too far gone to hear them.

“I haven’t seen her like this since it happened.” That’s Kara.

“What are we supposed to do? How do we help her?” Maggie.

“It’s—complicated.”

“Should we call Eliza?” That’s J’onn.

“No!” Kara, objecting as fervently as she’s capable. “No, Alex would kill me. She just needs some time.”

“I think I should go.” J’onn. “You can call me if you need me. I’ll—I think it’ll be better if I give you all some space.”

“J’onn.” Kara again. “Do you…do you know his name?”

Silence. Then, quieter:

“She wouldn’t tell me his name. Do you know it?”

More silence.

Then, J’onn, saying simply:

“Yes.”

And you feel that. You feel that in your bones. You don’t register it, not really, because you can’t begin to process your emotions, or really understand the gravity, the meaning behind words, any words, but you file away the ones you’re hearing, deep inside you, in case you ever need them. In case you ever feel ready.

But the way you feel now, you doubt you’ll ever feel ready.

“Don’t hurt him.”

That’s all you muster up as a goodbye to J’onn, and you still hate yourself for protecting Hennessy, but you also want to protect Kara, protect J’onn, protect Maggie, and so you don’t think about it, you just count the freckles on your right arm, like Kara told you to. Most of them are so faded, easy to ignore unless you have Kryptonian super vision, so you focus all your effort on diligently seeking out whatever remnants you can find and counting them, completely blocking out the world around you until you get about halfway up your forearm and encounter a challenge.

“Kara.”

Your voice still sounds as weak, as hopeless, as you feel, but it’s enough for your sister to hear, and she’s at your side faster than seems possible, even for her, so you wonder if she was sitting there the whole time.

“What do you need?”

“Does this count as one freckle or two?”

And you press your finger into the taut muscles of your forearm, right next to the spot where two freckles meet like a Venn diagram, like a filled-in figure-eight, obstructing your grounding exercise.

“One,” Kara proclaims, and you sigh with relief and go back to counting, but now you can detect that Kara is there, and J’onn is gone, but Maggie is there, you can sense her, she’s next to you, and she’s sad. She’s sad. Why is Maggie sad? You want to know but it’s too hard, too too hard to ask, and you feel yourself starting to fall again so you count freckles instead, and slowly Maggie and her sadness and even Kara all disappear, until you hear Maggie saying something, and you don’t think she’s talking to you, but you hear it.

“I feel helpless.”

Oh. That’s why Maggie is sad. You hate when Maggie is sad, but you can’t do anything about it, because your body isn’t your body and your voice isn’t your voice and your eyes aren’t your eyes. You exist, now, but you’re still an observer, a spectator to your own body. You exist, but outside your body, not in it. You can’t control it. You can’t control anything, other than to do the things Kara asks, because no matter what, you have to take care of Kara. You have to take care of Kara. So you can’t do anything other than count the freckles on this arm (your arm), can’t do anything other than _we’re okay, we’re safe_ , other than inhale, exhale. Inhale, freckle, exhale, freckle, we’re okay, freckle, we’re safe, freckle. Since when does this arm still have so many freckles on it?

“She’ll be okay.” This time you hear Kara, reassuring Maggie. She sounds different when she reassures Maggie than when she reassures you; you can’t identify exactly what’s different, but there is definitely a difference. “Once she comes back, she’ll let you take care of her again. But she’s not…she’s not here. Not right now. She’s not herself.”

You hear them continue to discuss you like you aren’t there, but you focus less on the content of their conversation and more on the soothing sounds of their voices. Freckle, Kara’s talking. Freckle, Maggie’s talking. Inhale, exhale. Breathe. You can breathe, you can breathe for Kara. She wants you to breathe, so breathe for her. She’s saved your life more times than you can count; you can breathe for her. You have to take care of her, no matter what. If she wants you to breathe, then breathe. Inhale, exhale. For Kara.

And for Maggie.

Yes, yes, for Maggie. Maggie is sad, and you want to her to feel better, and Maggie would want you to breathe. You can breathe for her, too. Two whole people, no more. Two whole people, no more, who want you to be okay, who want you to breathe. You can breathe for them. Inhale for Maggie, exhale for Kara. Inhale for Kara, exhale for Maggie. You can do that. Two whole people, no more, are here, wanting you to exist, wanting you to breathe so you can exist. You can do that. You can breathe for them. Breathing for them, that’s easy. That’s manageable. It’s not like fighting aliens or saving the planet or keeping them from dying. It’s just breathing. Nobody depends on you not screwing up. If you do it wrong (which you probably will), if you stop breathing, Kara and Maggie won’t stop breathing, too. But they would be sad, probably, for a while at least, and you don’t want to make them sad. They always try to make you feel better, they’re trying to make you feel better right now, so you should try to make them feel better, right? And it’s so simple—inhale, exhale. Freckle, freckle. You can do this. Two whole people want you to feel better, want you to keep breathing so you can exist. Two whole people, no more. You can do it. Just two people. Two people, that’s it, no more. You can breathe for two people.

“I’m out of freckles.”

Your sister is by your side again, not too close or trying to touch you, but close enough so you can feel her. Can tell she’s focusing in on hearing your heartbeat, even though you can’t feel your heartbeat. This body you’re inside of, this body you’re borrowing, it probably has a heartbeat, but you can’t feel it, because it’s not yours.

“Do you wanna count your other arm?” Kara asks, and you look at her, but you don’t see her, and you feel weird, so weird, why can’t you see her?

“No. What’s happening?”

“You’re home. You’re safe. Maggie and I are here with you, we’re not gonna let anything bad happen.”

“Midvale?”

“No. We’re in your apartment, Alex. See? On the cabinet there? That photo you took of us after I beat my personal potsticker consumption record on my first Earth birthday in National City?”

You squint, following her gesture across the room until you’re squinting at the picture in question. There are a lot of pictures on the cabinet, but you don’t see them, because Kara didn’t mention them. You only see this one. That’s definitely Kara, in the picture, and she’s grinning ear-to-ear, triumphantly, surrounded by dozens of empty takeout containers. And there’s you, smirking at the camera, amused if not somewhat horrified, and your hand is clasped around one of Kara’s, and you’re lifting her arm in the air as if declaring her the victor of a contentious boxing match. It’s definitely you.

“Do you remember that day?”

You do remember. Vaguely, but you remember.

“Yeah. I was excited to have you back. To have you close to me again. So I could protect you. Take care of you.”

“And you did. You always have,” Kara comments, pointedly, and you start to see her, a little. You see her thinking, she always looks that way when she’s thinking, but then you hear her talking, again. “You know, the other day, I was trying to think about the first time I ever ate a potsticker, but I don’t remember. Do you?”

Your response feels automatic, because the desire to help Kara is so ingrained in you that it takes no effort or intention. It’s written in your DNA. It’s breathing, it’s heart beating, it’s machinery you can’t control, don’t have to control. So you answer, because you have to.

“You’d only been living with us for a few months. You were still getting used to Earth and food and the fact that you could eat as much as you wanted. We couldn’t go out to eat at restaurants because you’d wolf down your whole meal before the server even walked away from setting it in front of you.”

“Yeah. The look on people’s faces was hilarious.”

Kara chuckles lightly, and you try to clone it, but you fail miserably, so you just keep telling the story, instead.

“It was mortifying. You ate everything. Mom and Dad’s food budget nearly tripled. I had to hide snacks around the house.”

“Is that why Jeremiah _really_ made me these glasses? So I’d stop x-ray visioning your snacks by accident?” Kara snarks, taking the risk to gently poke your arm. You don’t flinch away, but also don’t otherwise react to the contact.

“Wait, is that why you’re so skinny?” Maggie asks, sensing the shift in mood and feeling more comfortable involving herself in the act of helping you. “Because Kara stole all your food?”

“No,” Kara pouts. “I let her have food.”

“Mom and Dad were working late,” you continue, as if your story hadn’t been interrupted by their commentary. “They were at the lab, and it was just you and me for dinner. It was like the third time that week, and I was sick of pizza, so I asked if you wanted Chinese, but you’d never had Chinese food. So I ordered, like, half the menu, basically, figuring you’d eat everything whether you liked it or not, because at that point, as far as I could tell, you were a garbage disposal. You ate so much so fast, I didn’t know if you actually cared what it was or what it tasted like, or if you just indiscriminately needed fuel. But as soon as I gave you a potsticker, that night? It was like you’d never tasted food before. You acted like I’d just performed a miracle. Like I’d given you the greatest gift of your life.”

“Potstickers are really good!” Kara defends herself half-heartedly.

“You barely touched anything else we ordered. You made me call the restaurant back and order more, and then you demolished all of those in like, a second, and you tried to make me call them again, but I was too embarrassed to order from the same place three times in one night, so you found another Chinese place and tried to order all the potstickers they had. They were very confused.”

“That’s right,” your Kryptonian replies. “So were Jeremiah and Eliza, when they got home and saw the damage.”

“Yeah,” you reminisce. “They blamed me for it.”

Kara frowns sympathetically. “They liked to imagine I didn’t know better.”

“But you did.”

“Yeah,” she admits. “I did.”

“It’s just…this world is a lot for you to handle.”

Your sister doesn’t respond to that immediately, and the pause gives you time to catch up to the events that just unfolded. You’re still numb, unaware, but your bubble has expanded enough that you can tell Kara and Maggie are sitting on the floor, on each side of the body you’re inhabiting, the one that still isn’t yours, and they’re close enough to touch you but they’re wisely choosing not to, and you try to look across to the picture of Kara and the person who looks like you but you can’t see it, it isn’t there anymore, and you realize that there is no world _to_ handle, there is only inhale, exhale, freckle, freckle, but you’re out of freckles to count, and you’re starting to lose your grip on what’s happening where you are who you are. You’re starting to fall, fall, fall, but Kara will catch you, she always catches you, and she does, her voice comes into the darkness and it catches you, just in time.

“Remember for a while, after Jeremiah disappeared? When you’d have nightmares?”

The questions floats in the air, and under any other circumstances, you might have tensed, might have closed off, but you’re already so far away, so numb, the words barely seem real. You need more, more words, more Kara, and she figures it out, so she keeps talking.

“You’d have nightmares, and your heart would race, so fast, so loud, that it would wake me up, and I’d get in your bed with you and hold you, and you’d hold me, and we would promise each other we’d never mention in the light of day that we needed each other?”

You nod, absentmindedly, whether you realize it or not (you don’t).

“I need you, Alex. It’s not the light of day, but…it’s close enough. I need you.”

“I need you too.”

The words aren’t real, though, so Kara shakes her head.

“Say it like you mean it. Look me in the eyes.”

You try. Really, you try, but as soon as your eyes lock onto the crystal blue ones inches away from you, hidden behind lead-lined glasses, you break. You look into her eyes, and you _see_ them, and suddenly, in an instant, you go from feeling nothing to feeling _everything_ , feeling too much, feeling every emotion you’ve ever suppressed or ignored since the dawn of time. You sob, wail, bawl, without restraint or awareness.

You cry for every time you’ve ever worried about Kara, about Maggie, about J’onn, about your parents, about anyone. You cry for every time you’ve looked death in the face. You cry for every time an agent has died or gotten hurt on your watch. You cry for every time you’ve had to kill. You cry for your dad. You cry for the years of your life you wasted grieving, suffering, hiding yourself.

You cry for everything bad that’s ever happened.

To you, to Kara, to Maggie, to people you don’t even know.

It all hits you, engulfs you like a tidal wave you are powerless to stop.

You cry, and you cry, and when Kara cradles you in a grounding embrace, you sink into it as thoroughly as you’ve sunk into this pit of despair, and when Maggie’s tender voice whispers soothing words into your ear, you lean into that, and you don’t know how long it lasts, you don’t know how long you let yourself break down like that, but once you finally run out of tears, you don’t feel any better. You feel humiliated, ashamed. You feel pathetic, worthless, _exhausted_. Man, feeling things takes a lot of energy. Is that why you try your hardest to never do it?

You’re ready to break again, to cave under the weight of your shame, but as you try to extract yourself from Kara’s arms, she does it for you.

“Let’s get pizza,” she offers, as if to announce that you’re all just gonna gloss over the whole crying-breakdown-pit-of-despair debacle that just went down and move on without mentioning it, and frankly, that sounds ideal to you, since you’re embarrassed to have blown your cover and revealed yourself as someone who has emotions other than cool-under-pressure and imma-punch-this-alien, even though you only did so in front of your sister and your girlfriend, who have absolutely witnessed you broaden that scale before, albeit only one of whom had witnessed it to this extent. Still, you hate yourself for falling apart like that, even in front of your two favorite people.

“Okay,” you agree.

“And mozzarella sticks,” Kara adds. “Oh, and those little garlic knots.”

The little garlic knots always make you happy. Kara is being nice to you, and it almost dismantles you, makes you start crying again. You don’t like feeling things. Feeling things is dangerous. If you feel one thing, you have to feel other things, too, and you don’t want to feel other things. You’d rather feel nothing than feel those other things.

But then, Maggie’s arms circle around you, pull you close. Like a little kid who doesn’t want to be left at kindergarten. Like you’re a balloon that might fly away if not held hard enough—and face it, you are. You’re flying away, you need something to keep you here. Maggie doesn’t hold onto you as tight as Kara, because she physically can’t, but her hold is deliberate, impactful, revealing. It tells you that if she could hold onto you tighter, she would.

Because she’s scared.

Maggie is scared.

And of course Maggie is scared. You’re her strong, unyielding badass. Always in control, always demanding to be in control (you only agree to give up control when you’ve meticulously established when, how, and under what parameters you’ll give up control, and you only do it with Maggie because you trust Maggie, you love Maggie, you know you’re still completely in control of her taking your control away and so you _want_ her to take your control away, but only her, no one else, only her only her only her). She’s never seen you like this. Nothing close to this. She’s seen you lose a fraction or two of your composure when Kara was in danger, but she’s never seen you reduced to a catatonic shell of yourself, unable to recognize your own arm as you count the freckles on it, unable to form words or thoughts or remember where you are or how you got here or what is happening.

And she’s never seen you cry like that. You’ve shed tears in front of her, she saw you at your lowest after Jeremiah betrayed your family, after Rick Malverne captured you and almost killed you and you were afraid to shower alone for a couple weeks and constantly scanned rooms for stalkers or bugs. But she’s never, _never_ seen you…not like this. This lowest is so much deeper than you knew you could get.

So of course she’s scared, and of course she’s holding onto you like she could lose you any second, and you wish you could make her feel better, but you’re trying to shut down again, because this is _so hard_ and it _hurts so much_.

“Feeling things hurts.”

You offer that as an explanation. It’s all you can offer. You know it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t clarify or placate, but it’s all you can manage, and you know Maggie needs something, anything from you, so it’ll have to do for now.

“Yeah, I know, babe,” is all Maggie offers in return, but she does so sweetly, kindly, thoughtfully. “It sucks.”

You agree with that. It sucks. You hate feeling things, you don’t want to feel things. You don’t want this. You don’t want to deal with this, but Kara asked you to breathe, to breathe _for_ her. So you have to, you have to keep breathing. Inhale for Kara, exhale for Maggie. Inhale for Maggie, exhale for—

Where is Kara?

You don’t feel her next to you anymore. It’s just Maggie, and it used to be both of them, you used to be safe between your superhero and your cop and now your superhero is missing, she’s missing and you don’t know where she is and if she’s not next to you she must be in danger. Something must be wrong. She’s not next to you, not taking care of you, and so something must be wrong.

You start to panic, start to feel the walls closing in, and the more you look for her, the less of the world you can see, and even as Maggie gets closer to you, tries to shush you, calm you down, you can’t see her, you can’t feel her, and it’s all you can do to remember that at least she’s still there, your girlfriend is still there and maybe she knows where your sister is, maybe she can help you find her, protect her, save her.

“Is Kara okay?”

And Maggie doesn’t answer right away, so you ask again, more urgently, and she finally nods, and that nod is all you can see, that nod is all that exists in the world, because Kara is okay, and then your world expands to Maggie’s voice when she confirms.

“Kara is okay. She’s good. Just worried about you. She wants you to be okay.”

“I have to take care of her,” you recite, and it sounds as if you’ve said it by rote, by programmed demands of yourself that supersede all else.

“You can,” Maggie promises you. “If you take care of yourself, she’ll feel better. She’s worried about you, so if you take care of yourself, talk to her, let her take care of you, then she’ll feel better.”

That confuses you, and so you don’t respond. You try to make sense of it but it feels like you’re shoving a square peg in a round hole and insisting it’ll work. It just doesn’t add up, and you’re worried Maggie’s lying to you. You’re worried Kara’s not okay, and you start to panic again, but then your sister is back next to you, and you feel dumb. You feel paranoid. You feel guilty, for not trusting Maggie, because Maggie doesn’t lie to you, she knows you hate being lied to, no matter the circumstances or excuse, and she knows how fragile you are right now, even though you hate how fragile you are right now, so you should have known better than to think she’d lie to you.

You should have known better.

You should have known better.

_You should have—_

“Okay,” Kara interjects your thoughts, clapping her hands for good measure, as if she knows exactly what dark path you’re about to walk down. “Food is ordered, it’ll be here soon. Wanna watch a movie, or, ooh, you wanna watch _Say Yes to the Dress_?”

But you shake your head. _Your_ head. It is your head now. You feel more than you have in a while, in you don’t know how long, and you don’t want to. You feel Maggie’s arms around you, looser than before but still there. You feel the floor beneath you. You feel the couch behind your back. You feel Kara’s hand on your shoulder. The air is too cold and too warm at the same time. Your chest feels tight, your heart is racing, your skin is crawling, and it’s unbearable. Everything is unbearable.

You’re in your body, now, and you don’t like it.

You want it gone. You want to be numb again. It’s too much, everything it too much. If you feel your body, soon you’ll feel your emotions, reality will set in and nothing will be okay.

You absolutely can’t bear this for another second, but it won’t go away, so you stand up. And the mere fact that you’re able to stand up on your own, by your own volition, proves to you just how much you need this to go away. You’re in control of your body now and that will only lead to pain. So although you’re still a bit precarious on your feet, you stand, and you walk toward the kitchen, and you know you’re followed by Kara and probably Maggie, too, but you walk to the kitchen, and you know they’re asking you questions, if you’re okay, what do you need, can they get it for you, what’s wrong, but you don’t hear, you don’t care until Kara is standing in front of you, blocking you, and you stop walking, lean against the island. You look near Kara—not _at_ Kara, but in the general direction of her body, maybe a little further to the left than she’s actually standing, but close enough.

“I need a drink,” you say.

“I don’t know if that’s a—”

“Kara. For fuck’s sake. I’m a grown ass adult, and I want a fucking drink. If you really wanna stop me, you’re extremely capable, so go for it. Otherwise, hand me the bottle of whiskey on the counter there.”

There’s a pause, and then she picks it up, checking in with you, with your level of awareness, knowing the way your mind works, the way your defenses and coping mechanisms work, and so she holds it far away from you and asks, “You can see this?”

“Jesus, Kara—”

“Okay, okay! Fine. But promise me once the food gets here, you’ll switch to beer.”

And you scoff, moving to swipe the bottle from her hand, but she won’t let you have it yet.

“Please, Alex. Please. I don’t want to see you go down that road again.”

“Worked out last time,” you snort, and honestly, even though you haven’t started drinking (other than that half a beer you drank an indeterminate amount of time ago, back at Noonan’s), you feel, a bit, like you’re drunk.

You feel hazy, uninhibited, like whatever you do, it’s not actually you doing it, like you’re a marionette of some extrinsic entity.

So, you keep talking, because it’s not actually you.

“Got into the DEO. Didn’t have to be a stupid doctor. Instead I get to beat up evil aliens. All worked out.”

“Because J’onn kept his promise to Jeremiah. And now I’m gonna keep my promise to Jeremiah, and to Eliza, and to J’onn, and to you, and to—”

“Nobody ever made you promise to take care of me,” you snap, narrowing your eyes at your sister, feeling things bubble up inside you that you didn’t even know were there, dormant, but the same external force manipulates you into digging up those long-forgotten grievances. “Nobody ever gave a crap if you took care of me. They only cared if _I_ took care of _you_. They didn’t want you to—they got _mad_ at you when you saved me. When you tried to look out for me. They got mad. Supergirl is _my_ fault. Because I was on the plane, and I told you about the plane, and if I hadn’t been on it, or if you hadn’t known I’d be on it, you wouldn’t be in danger day in and day out. National City wouldn’t be Disney World for extranormals hoping to do harm. They wouldn’t flock here like they flock to Metropolis to take down Superman. People wouldn’t be in danger. Not the same way they are. They only are because I failed.”

Kara’s expression steels, and she presses you further. “That’s what you think?”

“I was supposed to take care of you. Always. S’posed to keep you out of trouble, keep you from getting caught. And I failed. I had one job. One. Job. Nobody ever wanted anything else from me. Mom and Dad only loved me when I took care of you, the DEO only wanted me because of you—”

“Danvers.”

Maggie is harsh, decisive, when she interjects.

“I think you should stop, Danvers.”

Glaring at your sister, you finally snatch the whiskey bottle away from her (or rather, she finally lets you snatch it away), and you immediately twist the cap off and take a long, large gulp, at least a few fingers worth, stalking off, heading toward any direction that is away from the blonde.

“Fine,” you conclude, trying to keep your voice level, keep it free of any trace of the ire that’s brewing in your blood, because you’re not angry at Kara, you don’t want to yell at Kara. You don’t know where this came from, you don’t know why you’re angry, but you are, and it feels right, it feels safe, to be angry, but Kara doesn’t deserve it, so you fight it. You take another swig of whiskey and you fight it.

“No, not fine. You’re doing it again,” Kara yells at you.

“Doing what?!” you yell back, and it feels good to yell, cathartic, even though you’re not angry at Kara, and in some distant galaxy of your mind, you know you’re not angry at Kara, but it feels so, so good to yell that you’re gonna yell at her anyway, you’re gonna take the bait she’s given you and you’re gonna run with it until it stops feeling good to yell at her.

“You spiral, Alex,” Kara persists. “Something sets you off, something bad, and you let it mix in with all the other things you’ve bottled up, and instead of dealing with it or processing it, you withdraw and get bitter and you drink and you act reckless and erratic, and this? Right here? This has been over eight years in the making and I don’t want you to go back to where you were. I don’t want you blacking out every night, taking drugs I’ve never heard of. I don’t want to wake up not knowing if you’re in a stranger’s bed or a holding cell, so no, Alex, it’s not _fine_ , you’re not _fine_ , and we both know if you don’t talk to me about it, you won’t deal with it, and if you don’t deal with it, you’ll spiral. You’ll self-destruct. And your life looks too good right now for you to ruin everything you’ve built.”

You try to ignore her, to drink your whiskey, but the tone she’s taken sets you off, somehow, it flicks some switch inside you that makes you want to yell back again, but your gaze drifts to Maggie, ashen and curled away on the couch, looking as if she’d hoped you forgot about her presence. You take another hearty pull of whiskey, shake your head at your sister, but she crosses her arms over her chest and glares at you.

The silent pall that falls over the room is too heavy for even Supergirl to lift. You stare each other down, stubborn bulls waiting for the other to make the first move, until, finally, Maggie dares to clear her throat.

“Should I go?”

“No!”

You both shout at her simultaneously, your tones convincing her even further that she’d be safer leaving than staying, but Maggie remains frozen in place by a combination of fear and torn allegiances. She knows about your past but you’ve always been wary sharing it with her, except now, you’re too angry to be ashamed, and you raise the hand that isn’t tightly around the whiskey bottle to shove a finger at Kara.

“I was just a kid,” you breathe harshly, incensed. “It was years ago. I’ve grown up. I have a good job—a stressful job, but a good job, a job I love—and I have a girlfriend, and I finally got to a place in my life where I have admitted to myself that I want a _girl_ friend. You can’t hold it against me, the things I did when I was young, and broken, and…directionless. It’s not fair.”

“It is, though. It is, because I haven’t seen you this bad in _years_ , Alex.”

You suck in a ragged breath, take a quick sip of whiskey, closing your eyes to savor the slight yet delightful burn as it slides down your throat. You close your eyes, and that is a mistake, because when you close your eyes, you see him, see his face. Hovering over you, pressing against you, invading you, invading your space. And then you see it again, at Noonan’s, invading you, invading your space, showing up where you don’t want it. You don’t want it, you don’t want him, but he’s there, and you see him, you can’t stop seeing him, and you know it will be days until this goes away, and that bittersweet discovery feels heavy, feels like more than you can deal with alone, and so you try to say something, try to make it better, try to explain how you feel, try try try, but it’s so hard to articulate, so your trytrytry ends up coming out as this:

“He still looks the same. Like a fucking asshole.”

It’s not quite what you were going for, but it draws a sound out of Kara that you don’t hear often. It’s a cynical kind of snort, defeated, almost, but not quite, it sounds less like surrender and more like surrendering to the fact that this isn’t even a fight at all, like surrendering to harsh reality, one she could no longer deny lest she make it worse. She shrugs, in fact.

“I still wanna hurl him into the sun.”

And despite yourself, you feel your lips twitch, feel the most infinitesimal smirk encroach your expression, as you concede, “I still wanna maybe let you.”

You both chuckled slightly at that, though there is no heart or soul or vigor to it.

Then, Kara dares to ask, “Can I hug you? Or are you not ready yet?”

“You can hug me.”

And then you are surrounded by Kara, she even lifts off the ground briefly, in a gesture that reminds you of your father, and you feel a pang of sadness, of longing, but it’s replaced soon by the warmth of your sister’s arms, and as she puts you back on your feet, she asks, “Can I hurl him into the sun?”

You say maybe, just to make her feel better, just to extend the moment, a moment that you don’t know how long it lasts, because the next thing you know, there’s a knock at the door that careens you out of the moment, and suddenly you’re no longer melted into your sister’s touch, you’re on high alert, even while Kara swears to you, over and over, that you’re safe, you’re home, it’s just the delivery person, you’re safe, you’re home, and you want to believe her, you do, you really do, but your heart is pounding so fast that you start to tune it out, you tune out all evidence of your existence because otherwise you’re afraid it’ll cease to be. Afraid _you_ will cease to be. You’re afraid the sheer action of acknowledgement will kill you, will tear you limb from limb, and so you refuse, you refuse to do it, so you take another drink, you seek the burn, the burn that tells you this will be over soon, you won’t feel this soon, and then Kara spins you, holds your back to her front, tighttighttight, bruisingly tight, so tight you feel her lungs expanding and contracting through your skin, between your shoulder blades, and her cheek is pressed up against yours, she’s breathing through her nose and you can hear the steady pattern, feel the warmth wash over your skin, relaxing you, and soon, slowly, your breath starts to move to the beat of hers. When her lungs press against your back, they cause yours to expand, and when they retreat, yours contract, following them, seeking them out, and it’s just enough, just enough to anchor you, just enough to pull you back, to catch you.

Yes, you are unstable, and you are certain that every time you have a feeling, that feeling will be the one that kills you, but you also have Kara, and Kara won’t let anything bad happen to you any more than you’ll let anything bad happen to her.

Still, you don’t want to feel. Feeling is dangerous, it sucks, and you don’t want to do it, so you tip a bit more whiskey into your mouth and you hum against the burn, the burn that’s the only thing you’re willing to feel right now.

“You should eat, Danvers.”

And you know that Maggie’s right, probably, especially when Kara reinforces the suggestion a few seconds later, but it just seems so hard. You spend a couple minutes considering it, alternating between chewing your bottom lip and taking healthy sips of whiskey, and you really, _truly_ try to regard eating as an option, try to believe it’s a thing you can do, but it just seems so hard. So unnecessary. You don’t want to eat. All the space that food will take up, you can fill with alcohol, instead. Precious, precious alcohol, which would numb you, keep you from feeling the things that will almost certainly prove fatal through the mere act of being felt. You’ve already felt so many things tonight. It’s been such a whirlwind rollercoaster tsunami, the last…how much time has it been? How much time has passed since—

A chill shudders through your body as his face pops into your head again. His face, just another face in the crowd at Noonan’s, but in your mind, in your memories…

Suddenly, you feel dirty. Tainted. Bile creeps up your throat, and your skin feels like it’s burning, and you can smell it. You can smell _him_. He’s all over you, surrounding you, you’re contaminated by him, polluted by him, _covered_ in him.

“I need to shower.”

Your declaration is loud, agitated, and you rip yourself away from your sister’s body, afraid you’ll infect her too, afraid she’ll find out how unclean you are, afraid she’ll realize how vile you are, how disgusting he made you.

“I need to shower now. _Now_.”

“Okay.” Kara takes it in stride, keeping her hands open and visible in front of her own shoulders, as if to silently affirm that she won’t try to touch you again. “Go take a shower. I’ll bring you a change of clothes, just leave the door open, okay?”

So you retreat into the bathroom, turn the shower on as quick as you can, strip your clothes as quick as you can, and you and your whiskey are standing underneath the spray before it’s warmed up even a degree, but you don’t care, you don’t care if the water is forty degrees Fahrenheit or centigrade, because you just need to get clean. You stand rigid, bravely enduring the near-freezing water, not faltering even once you start to shiver, turning to your whiskey to warm you up from the inside out, and then a thought crosses your mind, a jarring one, of unknown origin:

This is the first moment you’ve been alone since you saw his face again.

You never thought you’d have to see his face again.

All those years ago, Kara, in her bright-eyed, bushy-tailed naivety, wanted you to report Hennessy to the police, or at least campus authorities. But you, disenfranchised, drowning in self-hatred, self-blame, you candidly (perhaps too candidly, you always hate to crush her faith in humanity, but you were hurting and volatile and kept lashing out) revealed that, if you believed reporting the incident would have resulted in anything just or fair or good, you would have reported it in a heartbeat, but you knew all too well how these things worked, knew all too well what would happen. And though she didn’t understand, Kara accepted. Besides, you reasoned—he was ahead of you. Only a few months more, and he’d be graduated, moved on, far away from you. You wouldn’t have to see him anymore.

Because really, that’s what you have always been most afraid of. Seeing him. You’ve been afraid of exactly what happened tonight: you’re sitting around, enjoying yourself. Off your guard. And then, out of the blue, you see him. He’s there, and because you’re off your guard, something bad happens. Something bad happens because you’re off your guard, you let yourself get too drunk, you let yourself—

Still, almost nine years later, your thoughts still drift to that man, to that night. Still, almost nine years later, you willfully deny, hide, cover up that your thoughts still drift to that man, to that night—or at least how often. You won’t even admit it to Kara, or Maggie, how often you stand in the shower, like this, and wonder about him, think about him. Think about it.

Because there is a distinction, in your mind. Over the years, you’ve managed to separate _him_ from _it_. It. What happened. You have managed to draw a line in the sand between the actor and the act, if for no other reason than because it’s easier, that way. Sometimes, you want to think he hadn’t known what he was doing to you, that he hadn’t realized you didn’t want it, hadn’t realized how drunk you were, or that you didn’t like it, or that you were fighting it, telling him no. He was drunk, too, after all, and you were both young, and excuses excuses excuses. Sometimes, you want to have faith in humanity, like Kara does, so you think that if he _had_ known better, he would have listened. Sometimes you think that if he knew now what he’d done to you, that he’d hate himself, that he’d be sickened and destroyed, as sickened and destroyed as you are, as you were, having endured what he did to you.

Other times, though, that same line of thinking makes you see red. Fills you with rage, thinking that you’d gone through all you’d gone through, and meanwhile, he’s lived his life blissfully ignorant, having no idea what he did to you.

And still other times, the only solace you can find is in knowing that maybe no, he isn’t a good guy who once made a mistake. Maybe he is, indeed, a bad guy. He is a bad guy, who does bad things, including (but likely not limited to) the thing he did to you. You know that those kinds of people exist; more often than you wish, in your line of work, you go face-to-face with people—human, alien, and in between—who are bad, who do bad things, who intend to, if not delight to, do harm to others, to innocents, innocents who did nothing to them, who did nothing to deserve harm being done to them.

For this reason, for this cognitive dissonance, you tend to take it day by day. When you think of him, think of it, you work your way through whatever line of thinking makes you feel safest, most assured, at the given moment. You compartmentalize, you intellectualize—you are a scientist, a soldier, so you do what any good scientist, any good soldier does when faced with complex, unwanted emotions.

You compartmentalize. You intellectualize. You justify. You push it down.

You drink it down.

You turn the Kryptonite emitters lower than usual, to fifteen percent instead of twenty, without telling Kara, so that when you train together, she hits you maybe a little harder than she intends, but you don’t let it show, you swallow that pain, you thrive on it, you cherish it, you push yourself _harder harder harder_ until you stop thinking, until you are lost in the sound of your body screaming at you to stop, but you are stronger than your body, you are stronger than your thoughts, than your pain, and you can’t hurt Kara but she can hurt you, but she doesn’t know it, doesn’t know to pull back, but that’s what you want, and she can hurt you without knowing but you won’t let her hurt you because _you are in control_.

You are in control.

You are in control.

A light knock on the door jolts you from your stupor, followed by Kara announcing herself in a soothing voice. Still, the rude awakening causes you to jump a foot in the air, and you realize you’re now standing under an almost-punishingly hot stream of water, so paralyzed by your thoughts and the way you feel, you haven’t so much as reached for the soap to make that feeling go away. Not that it matters—you’re afraid you’ll never feel clean again, even with all the soap in the universe.

Your sister, however, seems preoccupied by the amount of steam that’s filled the room in what she alerts you is a short period of time (although you have no way to verify that, because time means nothing to you anymore), and she can’t fully suppress her rebuke as she sticks her hand around the shower curtain to adjust the faucet and pleads with you.

“Alex, that was too hot. Please.”

“He’s everywhere.”

Your words come out in a heavy, haunted whisper. They come out like an omen, and they scare you, because they’re too true, and you almost hear the shiver go down your sister’s spine.

“J’onn said he’ll only be in town two days. Then he’ll be gone. It’ll be okay.”

“I feel him. On me.”

Kara doesn’t respond, but you don’t continue, either. And then, she gasps, and she rips back the shower curtain, and you’re not sure if she could hear the slosh of whiskey in its bottle or if she caught an accidental x-ray glance through the plastic barriers (because once you see her face, you note that she’s taken off her glasses and put them on the counter next to the clothes she brought you, because they’re all fogged up from the steam in the room), but either way, she pulls the curtains open, and she’s glaring at you, sees you slumped despondently against the tile wall, nursing your bottle of whiskey, and this time, she doesn’t pretend she isn’t disappointed, doesn’t attempt to disguise the admonition.

No, she full-on scolds you, and manages to do so with one, intense growl: “ _Alex_.”

As she muscles the bottle from your hand.

“Hey, what the hell!”

And neither of you are sure if your protests are against the invasion of privacy or the whiskey theft, but once Kara begins to pour the far-too-little remnants of the bottle down the sink, your objections become solely about the loss of your liquor.

“When you finish your shower, you can drink all the beer you have, if you want, while you sit with me and Maggie. She picked out a shirt for you, one she thought would make you feel better. Because _that_ is why we’re here. We are here to take care of you, not enable you. If you need to drink, fine, but I’m not gonna have you down an entire bottle of whiskey and black out in the shower. Not again.”

You huff, but you also know she has a point, so you decide to compromise. “Okay, but if you’re tempted to pour the rest of my hard liquor down the drain, could you maybe just freeze-breath it instead, so I have to wait till it thaws out to drink it? Some of that stuff is expensive.”

“Deal.”

“I’ll be out soon,” you lie. “Once I…feel clean, again.”

“Right,” Kara nods, understanding what that means, somehow, you think. “I’ll see you soon.”

And she leaves, mostly closing the bathroom door but leaving the shower curtain open, and you stare at the empty whiskey bottle and you remember the amount you drank, and you realize it’ll affect you soon, and you don’t know what that will look like. Being drunk. You’ve always been an unpredictable drunk, and now will be even worse, so you start to feel scared. Scared of yourself.

You start to feel lonely, so unbearably lonely, and alone, but you can’t go out there yet, not until you’re clean. You’re lonely but you don’t deserve to not be alone yet, you’re too vile, too disgusting, your skin is crawling, prickling and so you snatch up a bottle of soap and you squeeze it onto your palm and you scrub scrub scrub at yourself until your skin is raw, scrub scrub scrub until you might bruise, scrub scrub scrub until there’s no possible way he could still be on you, you’ve used almost an entire bottle of body wash, and then, only then, do you realize that it’s Maggie’s.

It’s Maggie’s.

It smells like Maggie.

 _You_ smell like Maggie, like the men’s body wash she uses because it’s cheap and easy to find, and the scent is called something noncommittally clean-sounding like ocean or waterfall or fresh, but to you just smells like _Maggie_ , and now _you_ smell like ocean waterfall fresh Maggie, and in some way it centers you, brings you home, until you remember

Maggie won’t love you after tonight.

There’s no way Maggie will love you after tonight.

After she’s seen you like this—vulnerable, delicate, exposed, the antithesis of the hardcore, unstoppable badass that she thinks you are, that you try so hard to be—she won’t want you anymore. She’s nice, she’s kind, she’s polite, and so she’ll pretend for a while, see you through the storm, but in a week or two, just when you start to feel real again, she’ll break the news. She won’t tell you it’s because of this, because of how you are right now, but you’ll both know that’s the honest reason, whether or not she’ll fess up to it.

It’s inevitable.

She won’t love you after tonight. She _can’t_ love you after tonight, because tonight, you have shown her that you aren’t who she thought you were. You aren’t strong. You aren’t good. You aren’t capable. You are a failure, and you are broken. You don’t deserve her, and moreover, she deserves better than you. She deserves so much better, so so much better than you, because she is perfection, she is the only person who has come close to tearing down your walls (Kara doesn’t count, because you’ve never had walls with Kara, at least not in comparison to the bulwarks you have with everyone other than Kara), and you worship the ground she walks on and you do so for good reason, and you don’t deserve her, and she deserves better than you, and after tonight, she’ll finally understand that, and so you breathe in the glorious smell of her indistinctly marketed body wash, and you prepare yourself for her imminent departure from your life. You mourn the loss prematurely, because you are so, so certain that she can’t love you anymore, now that she knows, you’re so certain that honestly, you won’t be surprised if you walk out into the living room to find that Maggie isn’t here, find that she’s left, left the apartment, left you. Easier to leave you now, when you’d barely notice, when Kara is already in caretaker mode, than to wait for you to start to get over this.

Because who the hell knows when you’ll get over this.

So you brace yourself, and you step out of the shower without shutting it off, because without the sound of the water, there will only be the sound of Maggie not being here. Kara left you your fluffiest towel to dry off with, and you almost wish it were rougher. You wish you could hurt, again. You deserve to hurt. You want to hurt outside the way you hurt inside. Your skin is tingling from your harsh treatment, but it’s welcome compared to the searing pain of feeling him on you, and you just wish you could hurt. You wish for pain that makes sense, pain that you can look at and understand, pain that is visible, documented.

Because when you walk outside this bathroom and find that Maggie isn’t here (and you are so, so certain that will be the case), that pain will eviscerate you, and you’d rather shatter half the bones in your body, rather sever your spine, rather amputate your own leg without anesthesia than endure the pain of Maggie leaving you right now.

Yet, she’s going to. You know she is. Hell, she probably already has.

So you brace yourself, brace yourself in the overly-fluffy, too-soft towel, rubbing it as hard as you can against your tingling skin, for the inevitable. When you go out there, Maggie won’t be there, it’ll just be Kara, and you’re ready. You’re ready to face it, you know it’s coming, and it feels easier, somehow, because you know it’s coming, so you turn toward the counter to put on the clothes that Kara brought you.

Then you see it.

The soft, dark orange tee shirt you cherish like an ancient monument. The soft, dark orange tee shirt that says ‘ _Hello, sunshine_ ’ on it, that your mom bought for you (you think as a joke) when you were an angsty teenager, that you never wore for years, until you joined the DEO and stopped having time to do laundry and started pulling from the deep confines of your closet just to have something to sleep in or wear to the store that didn’t smell like sweat or blood or sand, and somehow that shirt had followed you from Midvale (though you swear you left it there to rot), so you’d wear it sometimes.

Then, the first time Maggie slept over, she’d seen this same shirt on top of your laundry basket, and she’d slipped it on without thinking, without knowing, so she could make coffee while you were in the shower.

And Jesus Christ almighty, if that wasn’t the best moment of your life.

Seeing Maggie wearing that shirt, you’d wondered for a second if she was even real. The sheer fact that she was in your apartment, in the _morning_ , after having spent most of the night before having sex with you ( _lots_ of sex), and then she was wearing that shirt, _your_ shirt, and she looked fucking radiant and you had to wonder if she was even real.

But she was.

She is.

She has to still be real. This shirt isn’t an accident—Kara specifically told you that Maggie picked this shirt out for you, and so you know she did it on purpose, because that would be a cruel joke. Either she is playing a cruel joke, or she genuinely doesn’t care enough about you to remember the significance of this shirt, and the universe just wants you to suffer even more.

So you brace yourself, and you turn off the water, because maybe you don’t need it to drown out the sound of Maggie not being here, because maybe there is no sound of Maggie not being here because maybe Maggie _is_ here, on the other side of that door, waiting for you.

You hear Kara talking, her speech trailing off when she hears you turn off the shower, and then she gets quieter, more muffled, and you can’t hear what she’s saying, but you know she’s talking about you, and you stand, stiff, waiting to hear another voice, the voice of whoever she’s talking to, because you need it to be Maggie, you need Maggie to be here or you won’t survive this.

She’s here.

You hear her voice, hear her sigh. She’s here.

So you slip on the sweatpants and tee shirt Kara brought you, and you head toward the voices, and you see them, at the kitchen island, you see Kara standing next to Maggie, her arm draped over Maggie’s shoulders, because your girlfriend is hunched over the counter, holding her head in her hands, and you balk at the sight.

Why are you doing this to them?

Your girlfriend is sad, is worried about you, and it’s your fault. You made this her burden, her problem, and she has her own problems to deal with. Problems worse than yours. This, you—what is the matter with you? This is nothing. You are nothing. Maggie has gone through so much worse than this, Kara has gone through so much worse than this. What even is this? You break like you’re made of glass over something that happened almost nine years ago, something that wasn’t even a big deal.

You hate yourself.

Maggie should leave you. Or you should leave her, do her a favor, give her the courtesy of not having to feel guilty, guilty like you feel now for doing this to her, for putting this on her, for not being strong enough, not being good enough, not being able to handle the littlest pinprick without bleeding out, for not being able to fight back _you should have fought back why didn’t you fight back what is wrong with you_

And then you’ve sunk to the floor, somehow, and Maggie and Kara have rushed to your side but you push them away, you crawl away, crumple in on yourself, because this is all your fault. You let this happen to you, and then you let this break you, and then you made it their job to pick up the pieces of you, and that isn’t fair to them. It isn’t fair and you can’t take it back but you can take it away, make it not their problem anymore, because they have their own problems and their problems are worse than your problems, every problem is worse than your problems, all pain is worse than your pain because your problems, your pain, are _nothing_ , and you are nothing. You are _nothing_. Nothing but a problem, nothing but pain, you cause people pain, you are actively causing your loved ones pain just by being near them.

Your sister tries to talk to you, so you cover your ears with your hands, because listening to her try to talk you down just makes this worse. You’re supposed to take care of her, and instead, she has to take care of you, because you can’t handle anything, you can’t handle the littlest thing, you can’t even breathe right unless she tells you how, and it’s not fair to her. She lost her parents, she lost her planet, she lost her whole life and had to rebuild from scratch in a place she knew nothing about, with nothing at her disposal other than you, and you are worthless, you were worthless at helping her then and you are worthless at helping her now. You’re supposed to protect her but you only make things worse for her, you make her life worse, because you can’t do anything right, not even the simplest thing. Every time you try to help her, to protect her, you fail. You fail constantly, persistently, pervasively, at everything, and your mother is right about you, she should be disappointed, she should be even more disappointed than she already (obviously) is because you’re the worst sister on the planet, and probably all the other planets, too, but in order to confirm that, you’d have to ask Kara, and she’d lie to you because she’d want to protect you, to take care of you, because you’re so bad at taking care of her that you make her feel like she has to validate you, tell you you’re doing a good job when of course you aren’t, anyone could tell that you aren’t, anyone _can_ tell that you aren’t. But she’s too nice, too kind, and you don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve to have her in your life, she’d be better off without you.

You try to tell her that, you open your mouth to tell her all that, but your mouth won’t make sounds. You can’t even _talk_ properly, you’re so worthless, so you shove your face into the floor, clamp your hands over your ears, and you wait for them to leave you alone, leave you alone like you should be, you should be alone, they should be free of you, free from you.

Kara’s trying to pry your hands away from your ears, but you won’t budge, and she’s trying, straining to be careful, you can tell, because she doesn’t want to break your wrists, but part of you doesn’t care if she does, and still another part of you kind of hopes she does, you hope she does break you, and you don’t know if it’s because you want to hurt or because you want proof you’re not as strong as you wish you were or both or neither, but in the moment, it doesn’t sound so bad, having Kara break your wrists, except that you know she’d feel awful for hurting you, and you don’t want to cause her any more suffering than you have already, and you know that (for some sick, twisted reason that’s probably your fault) Kara’s worst nightmare is hurting you, even by accident, even if you asked for it.

You asked for it.

You asked for this.

You know you did, so why are you doing this? What is wrong with you?

A chilly hand slides up your spine, pulling you from your darkness, because it’s not Kara’s hand. Kara’s hands are never cold. Maggie’s hands are always cold, but Maggie’s not here. She left you. She left you because she—

Wait, no. Maggie’s here. She’s still here, by some miracle, or because she’s a masochist, or a martyr, or because a judge ordered her to complete excessive community service hours or something, there has to be some reason she’s here, because obviously, the reason isn’t you.

But the reason has to be you because she has her cold hand on the small of your back, gentle gentle gentle, like she knows you might pull away at any moment, and the reason has to be you because you’re wearing the shirt. The shirt that’s her shirt now, even though it’s your shirt, but it’s her shirt, because it makes you think of her and how happy she makes you, and she picked it out for you so you could wear it tonight.

So the reason she’s still here has to be you.

So why are you like this?

“I’m sorry,” you mutter. Maybe you say it louder than it sounds to you, but your hands are still pressed over your ears, so it’s muffled. “I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know why I’m like this.”

Then it’s warm hands, Kara’s hands, easing your hands away from your head, and you let her. You let her uncover your ears, and the world isn’t as loud as you thought it’d be, and you let her link her fingers with yours.

And she says: “You feel this way because you’re letting yourself feel things, and you never let yourself feel things. You never deal with things when you need to, so they’re all coming up now.”

And that blunt, bordering on critical honesty rattles you. It strikes you, makes some deep, faraway part of you—the part that’s normally on the forefront but tonight doesn’t have room to exist—it makes that part of you wonder if Kara’s upset with you, if she’s disappointed in you. You want to talk to her about it, you really do. You want to ask her what she feels, how you can help, how you can do better, but you’re too tired to change right now. You’re too tired to think, too tired to face your reality as Kara presents it, and so, instead, you say again, “Feeling things sucks.”

And again, Maggie says, “I know.”

Except this time, Kara’s there, and she sighs, but she does also say, “I know.”

Maggie’s voice is kind, compassionate when she asks you, “Do you know what you’re feeling?”

You take a second, but the best you can come up with is: “Drunk.”

And Kara sighs, but says, “Not really what we were going for, but it checks out. Let’s get some food in you, yeah?”

“It’ll probably be cold—” Maggie starts, but you shrug it off, automatically explaining:

“Kara will take care of that.”

And sure enough, she opens the pizza boxes and a few bursts of heat vision later, the food is warm again.

You feel awkward, unsure how to successfully transition from a shattered pile of trash heaped on the floor to pretending to be functional human being who eats food. Luckily, Maggie helps, shepherding you to the couch. You stay on the floor in front of the couch, though, because it feels right, and you appreciate that Kara and Maggie quietly settle on the couch, bracketing you without staying too close.

There is food in front of you, and you’re supposed to eat it, but you don’t remember how. You know the more you think about it, though, the harder it will get, so you just try, see how it works out for you. You put the food in your mouth and chew it. It doesn’t taste, or you don’t taste it, but it chews, you chew it, and you swallow it, and the action gives you something to focus on other than what’s going on inside your brain, something to do other than feel things, and you’re sure it’s making Kara and Maggie happy.

“Is J’onn okay?” you ask vaguely, unsure of where the thought came from.

“Yeah,” Kara assures you. “He texted to check in. Reminded us that you already have the day off tomorrow.”

“Right,” you mutter, trying your hardest not to remember that you have a job, that you are supposed to be a badass black ops agent, but that after tonight, you’ll probably lose that job.

Because you let that motherfucker get to you again.

“I don’t remember this name.”

Suddenly, you’re sandwiched between your superhero and your cop again, and your food isn’t in your hand anymore, and their food isn’t in their hands. Their hands are floating near your body, afraid to touch, but ready in case you need it.

“What do you mean, Danvers?”

“J’onn said he knows it. I don’t. I never did. Or maybe I did, and I just didn’t remember. I was drunk. Really drunk. Dizzy. I don’t—he had some stupid frat boy nickname that they all called him. Everyone on campus called him it, and I don’t…I don’t think I ever figured out his real name.”

“Oh,” Kara breathes, and you can feel the inner conflict radiating off her. “Do you…?”

“I don’t know yet.”

And then it’s Maggie’s voice, reassuring you, telling you it’s okay.

But nothing feels okay

Maggie tells you again. She tells you again that it’s okay, or at least it _will_ be okay, and Kara echoes that. Kara promises you it’ll be okay.

“Promise?” you ask hollowly.

Kara hesitates before assuring you, “I promise it will get better than this. I promise it won’t be this bad anymore. You have me, and you have Maggie, and you have J’onn, and you have anyone else you are willing to confide in. Alex, I know how hard it is for you to see it, but you are surrounded by people who love you and want to help you, to take care of you and support you and see you happy, and who will do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

“Why?”

The word sounds broken, just like you are, and that’s how you know it comes from your mouth. Also, because you feel your sister and your girlfriend physically recoil, so they probably weren’t expecting it, so they probably didn’t say it.

“Alex Danvers,” Maggie breathes, ghosting her hand over your cheek to show you affection without actually touching you. “You are the most incredible person I’ve ever met. The smartest, the bravest, the toughest, the strongest—the most loving, caring, _annoying_ , headstrong—your sister is literally bulletproof, and yet you still jump in front of her to protect her from gunfire. And seeing you do that…it makes me wanna jump in front of you, jumping in front of her. You’re my ride or die, Danvers, and you make me a better person just from knowing you, and getting to be around you. Osmosis.”

You close your eyes, unable to think, unable to breathe, about what she just said to you.

“Can I touch you?” she asks gently, and in lieu of responding, you blindly lean your face in the direction of where you know her hand lingers, waiting for permission. You lean into her touch until it is all you can feel, all you can understand, all you can imagine the world being.

“Don’t leave me,” you plead with her, and a low chuckle escapes her throat.

“Oh, babe, it’s gonna take a hell of a lot more than this to get rid of me.”

Your eyes water behind their lids. “But I’m…”

“The love of my goddamn life, is what you are.”

“Promise?”

It doesn’t sound the same as it did before—it sounds almost five percent closer to real, this time.

“Promise.”

And for the first time since you saw his face, you feel an emotion that doesn’t seem deadly.

“I love you,” you say.

You say it to both of them.

And they say it back to you.

And you think, maybe, just maybe

Maybe they mean it.

**Author's Note:**

> So, yeah.
> 
> I'm contemplating writing a follow-up piece, or potentially a version of the night through Maggie's perspective. As someone who has been both the survivor and the support system, I think it could be worth exploring both sides, so lemme know if that's something you'd read.
> 
> Anyway, thank you for reading this one. If you actually managed to make it through the whole thing, that is. Either way, you deserve a hug.


End file.
